Separated by a Common Language

It's the last morning of my (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation—off to the airport in less than two hours. But Will W just pre-wrote for me most of a blog post, so I'm going to take advantage and get another post up before I land back in work reality. Here's what Will wrote: Struggling to see the screen,...

If you have any interest in the doctor-patient relationship, I very much recommend Dariusz Galasiński's blog. He writes thought-provokingly about various things that he and I have in common: being immigrant linguist patients or linguist immigrant patients or immigrant patient linguists. But probably...

A 2010 blog post from the Prosody Lab at McGill University was pointed in my direction last week, and judging by the reaction when I tweeted it, I'm not the only one who was surprised by the should-be-evident-but-nearly-invisible difference between British and American it reported. The post is by...

Jane Setter recently asked me about noodles. Her take on them was that Americans can call spaghetti noodles and the British can't. My take, as ever, is: it's complicated. Let's start with the British. In my experience (and, I think, Jane's) noodle in the UK is associated with Asian food. This is...

If you're looking for discussion of other (o)e or (a)e words, please click here to see/comment at the more comprehensive post on the topic. So, as we've seen in that aforementioned blog post, British and American spelling differ sometimes in the use of the ligature (connected letter) œ, or as it's...

This is part 2 of my 2013 WotY posts, the UK-to-US part. Part 1 is here. I get a bit embarrassed when I tell journalists about the UK-to-US Words of the Year, as there are too many "naughty" ones (2012: bollocks, 2006: wanker). 2013's is considerably milder, but still in the tee-hee range, if not...

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Mark Liberman at Language Log has saved you from the rant that this weekend's post was to be. Oh, thank you, Mark! His post from earlier today does what needed to be done about journalist Matthew Engel's BBC piece "Why do some Americanisms irritate people?" (Yes, people.) The Language Log post starts...

I picked up a free copy of the Financial Times's FT Magazine in the airport, and was interested to read this bit in an article about body-part names and communication between doctors and patients. Technically speaking, the anatomical structure the consultant was looking at was the abdomen, which...

My brothers and I have discussed making a 'Mom bingo' game, in which you get to mark a square in your bingo card if it matches something that our mother regularly says or does--mostly says. Things like to each his own, said the old woman as she kissed the cow and we're off on an adventure! and paint...